Esther Glasgow (right) and daughter, Connie Bremerer (Gary Landers photo) | ZOOM |

Esther Glasgow just wanted to help her daughter avoid foreclosure.

But in her quest to get loan money to help, the Colerain Township woman says she was duped into giving her own house away to an investor. She had to get a bank loan to buy back the home she had owned outright and lived in for three decades.

She didn't save her daughter's house, either. The same investor bought it in foreclosure and resold it for a profit.

Glasgow, now 80, says investor Robert A. Dressman and an associate, Lori Stewart, tricked her into signing over the deed of her $73,700 home. She says she thought she was signing papers to secure a loan to help her daughter and son-in-law, who were on the verge of losing their Springfield Township home.

Glasgow, who says she is illiterate, says she thought the papers simply listed her home as collateral for the loan. When she was told four months later to move out of the house, she fought the eviction in 1996 by suing Dressman in Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas.

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Dressman says he didn't trick Glasgow. He says his deal would have kept Glasgow and her daughter in their homes as tenants with an option to buy later. But they didn't pay the rent.

"It was her choice to help her children, and I was willing to let her do that," he says.

He also says he no longer conducts business with Stewart since she was imprisoned for nearly four years for stealing investors' money. Stewart, who was released in December 2001, did not return phone calls.

Dressman bought the daughter's house at a sheriff's sale for $85,000 in October 1995 and sold it in May 2000 for $119,500. From 1998 through 2000, he or his associates made sales totaling $1.3 million for 24 homes that ended in foreclosure.

Today, Glasgow still struggles with payments. Her daughter and son-in-law live in an apartment just down the street from the home they once owned.